Thread:Mixed talk/@comment-27493717-20180811160656/@comment-27493717-20180817193920

Alright.

I created a new wiki, which is running on Linux on a raspberry pi and based on the Mediawiki package by Bitnami. The wiki's general structure is a lot like from what you know from classic Wikipedia with users having no profile pics and there being classic user talk pages instead of message walls.

There also were no forum or discussions whatsoever, so this is really just good old classic vanilla Wikipedia as it was back in the old days, but with the backend being supported, so you can read documentations made by the developers of the original software and might even be able to ask them about it.

So far, I tested the basic functions, added various test pages, two images and set the wiki's logo.

While editing, I noticed, that the wiki itself works very well. I tested English, German and Japanese text and the wiki supports our Romaji writing and the Furigana and Kanji ones! (I didn't test this with article titles yet)

Unfortunately tabbers and polls are seperate add-ons, but their packages can be found and installed at any time.

Also, changing the wiki logo was very difficult. I needed to go through a good part of the Linux file system via a terminal interface (text-only with no graphics), change the keyboard layout, get used to the vi text editor and find the wiki files (their location is only sparsely documented, as if you are expected to know them right from the start) before I was able to edit the php file's pointers to point at the png-image which I already uploaded via a Wikipedia-esque interface.

Currently, the wiki has the default name, which is "user's Wiki!" and sports the default white theme with an image of Kishin Zenki from Vajura Fight instead of the default Wikimedia logo in the upper left corner.

Editing the wiki was a lot of fun, even if I was mainly just testing basic functions. The Linux commands were very tiring, as I haven't been coding in Linux for a long time, but after some time, I was able to accomplish what I wanted, so I was able to refresh my Linux knowledge to some extend and learn new things about the wiki backend, which you will never see over at Wikia/FANDOM, as you can only see these when you edit the files on the server, which aren't available to admins or founders at Wikia/FANDOM.

(takes a deep breath)

Right now, my test wiki is only available in the local domain, which means, that it can only be accessed from computers, laptops and mobile devices in the local network. (this means, that right now, it can't be accesed from the internet like the current KDZ Wikias)

Also, I talked to my dad and he suggested, that the wiki should be placed into a seperate environment from our other machines. This will be for security reasons, so that our private computers, etc. won't directly communicate with the wiki and can't be hacked from the outside if anyone decides to attack the wiki for whatever reason.

I also read and mentioned, that it's possible to have WikiFarms with multiple wikis on one server. Right now, it's only a single test wiki on the testing machine.

Also, there aren't any users besides the default admin/bureaucrat called "user" yet, but this account is secured with a randomly generated password, so it's not an issue.

I still need to experiment with the user rights at the test wiki, as I don't know if a user needs to log in to edit, or if everyone can edit when the default settings are set.

My dad will also shut down the test wiki when I am not testing things, as we still don't know how or if it interacts with our private machines. While Bitnami seems okay, we never used any software provided by them, so we don't know if it's 100% safe to run it all the time. (usually my dad and myself configure stuff on our own instead of using pre-configured packages)

So there will be quite some testing to be done, but I am nonetheless very positive about it and will report again once there's more.